Wednesday, July 23, 2014

We've been using Disney's Frozen and the song "Let It Go" in some of our English classes at school this last week.

I like to dig into the background of the literature we use, and while I was doing so I noted a bit of momentary controversy. Some of the Christian community have claimed that both the film and the song are promoting homosexuality/bisexuality.

Naturally, many of the homosexual/bisexual community were only too happy to pick up on that and claim the song as a new anthem.

Pardon me for drifting off-topic for a moment, but I remain nonplussed by the use of the word, "gay", as a euphemism for homosexuality/bisexuality. "Gay" was once a corollary to the Japanese word 「派手な」(hade-na), "showy, ostentatious, dramatic, flamboyant". (And I wonder about the similarity between "gay" and 「芸」(gei), "arts/literature/crafts".)

The current use of the word in English presents a conflation. People who are "creative" are supposed to be "liberal" in their attitudes towards sexuality, particularly their own sexual behavior.

Hmm. Historically, much of our "greatest" art and literature has been produced in such an environment. By scare-quoting "greatest", I don't mean to disparage our cultural legacy. The kind of art that crosses cultural borders and endures history does tend to be born in the furnace of internal conflicts. And "liberal" sexual attitudes do tend to lead to internal conflicts. But they are not the only factors.

But there is another kind of "great", and the predominance of creative work is born in many kinds of trials, tribulations, strivings, conflicts, troubles.

There is much that is dramatic that is not at all about "coming out of the closet of sexual repression".

There is much that is romantic that does not involve sexual adventure.

There is more to both life and love than sex.

(Sure, queue somebody famous saying, "There must be, but I don't know what," I suppose. Woody Allen? I don't remember.)

Sure, the classic animal responses to stress are fight, flight, and sex. But sex is only one out of three there. And none of those are the correct general human response. One of the traits of the human animal is supposed to be sometimes reacting to stress by thought, and by behavior guided by rational thought.

Okay, I've ranted about the conflation. Someday I want to rant about the negative impact of that conflation on social and private dialog, and on our relationships and behavior. Today, I just want to say that conflating things with sex is not necessary.

When I first heard "Let It Go", the lyrics bothered me. Too many people I know spend too much of their lives repressing the wrong things, then break out of that repression, but fail to break out of the real self-oppression. But the final line of the song provides he counter-balance. The storm does matter for Elsa after all, and so does the cold. And I don't think the listener will be deaf to the irony in that line.

Put in context of the plot of Frozen, if "Let It Go" were intended to be a metaphor for "coming out" sexually, it is provided with a stiff warning that coming out is not the ultimate solution.

As members of the Disney crew who produced the movie have noted (quoting other artists and authors from pretty much every era), once you publish, the work of art takes a life of its own. People should interpret it according to their own ideas. That's part of the purpose of art.

But I don't think Elsa's differences have to be interpreted as a metaphor for a different sexual orientation. There are many ways people are different from each other, and there are many social influences that work to try to get us to suppress our differences.

And simply suppressing our differences is not good. Quite the opposite. We need to look at our differences, acknowledge them, embrace them, and put them to good use. Those differences are what makes the world go 'round, as the saying goes. And they also are important parts of what makes us as individuals tick.

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I will note that I'm a little ambivalent about the ending of Frozen.

Part of me wanted Hans to find out his love was not real by actually kissing Anna. Then he could have been a bit less treacherous, maybe found a more positive way to help set Anna and Elsa up for the act of true love.

I generally like plots to work out so that people can be forgiven of their mistakes.

Then again, in Frozen 2 (Unfrozen? I'm sure the stockholders are going to insist on a sequel.) maybe a plot twist as ex machina as in Frozen can bring Hans back to prove he's not such a bad guy after all. This is Disney, after all.

Monday, July 21, 2014

First, a list of applications I'm using regularly (on the train and at Church, mostly):

Jota+ -- text editor -- after learning (erk) more of the "gestures" (like how to let my finger just sit long enough on an icon), I have figured out how to start a selection. Also, an external (hardware) keyboard is sometimes useful.

Elecom bluetooth portable keyboard (real hardware) -- I have the old flexible one. Flexible means I have to put it on something flat to use it. Bluetooth means that I really can't use it when the WIFI is active, or when lots of people around me are using WIFI and/or the wireless phone network. Bluetooth stutters and repeats like crazy and does other undesirable things when there's a lot of stuff going on in those frequency ranges.

USB keyboard -- A cheap one, for using at home. Nothing special. But the physical keyboard is just more useable than the touch-screen keyboard, especially when I want to use control keys and Japanese input.

EMobile portable router -- Without this, I couldn't really use the thing as a portable. However, I'm not fully satisfied with it, and the lack of source code is a serious pain. I'm pretty sure there's a full-fledged GPL violation hiding in there. And the result is that I can't tweak the settings. Using it on the train is a bit hit-and-miss. And at church, sometimes it just won't connect.

Book of Mormon, Gospel Library, and several other apps from the Church. I can read the scriptures in English or Japanese. If my Spanish were good enough, I could read them in Spanish, too! Lots of languages. Except the Bible. I have the Bible (King James Version) in English on the tablet, but copyright issues prevent the Church from publishing the Bible in most languages other than English. But if the WIFI connection is good, I can get the tablet to read the scriptures out loud to me, too.

Firefox is in the Play Store after all! I also use Google's browser, of course.

Debian No Root -- finding ways to make it work for me. I can run gcc on it, and vim. Synaptic blows up on me from time to time, but apt-get works okay. gedit wouldn't load by synaptic, but "apt-get install gedit" took two tries and got it. YAY! A real text editor!

Terminal IDE -- This helps immensely with making the Android development stuff more accessible for people like me that just have to use C.